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James Woolsey, influential neocon and Iraq War booster, dies at 84

In his heyday, the former CIA director was among America’s loudest voices pressing for military intervention abroad

By Jim Lobe | Responsible Statecraft | July 23, 2026

R. James “Jim” Woolsey, a major Iraq and GWOT promoter and neoconservative Democrat, passed away Tuesday at 84.

Woolsey served briefly as CIA director but rose to much greater prominence as a consistent promoter on television and in the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages of both the Iraq War and the broader Global War on Terror, which he sometimes referred to as “World War IV.”

Indeed, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Woolsey was ubiquitous in arguing that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein not only was linked to al-Qaeda but may very well have approved or helped plan the plot himself.

After being forced out of his CIA director role by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Woolsey moved increasingly to the right, as noted in a generally respectful obituary published by the New York Times Wednesday, joining with the Washington-based Likudist neoconservatives led by the “Dark Prince” himself, Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Woolsey, an engaging if rather glib speaker who never seemed to run out of words, became a key part of what George Mason University anthropologist Janine Wedel identified as the “Neocon Core” in the years running up to and following the Iraq War and the GWOT. That included the promotion of confrontation with Syria and Iran as well as other states deemed hostile to Israel, and, hence, in their view, to the United States, as well.

That 11-member core, according to Wedel, included men who would hold key posts under President George W. Bush, among them Bush’s future deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz; his undersecretary of defense, Douglas Feith; his director for Near East policy on the National Security Council, Elliott Abrams; and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

All of these men served on a variety of overlapping boards of major Washington-based organizations and think tanks that aligned themselves with Israel’s right-wing Likud Party. Together, these groups acted as a remarkably effective media echo chamber after 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, particularly in spreading mis- or disinformation about Saddam’s alleged development of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction programs and ties to al-Qaeda.

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In addition to Perle and the rest of AEI’s foreign policy wing staff, they included groups such as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (recently renamed the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, or JINSA); the Center for Security Policy (CSP); the more moderate Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a letterhead organization that promoted U.S. global hegemony and regime change in Middle Eastern countries considered hostile to Israel.

Woolsey was involved in nearly all of the veritable galaxy of neoconservative front groups created to advocate for policies like invading Iraq. He held positions on the advisory and other boards of CSP, WINEP, and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He also served as the chair of the Leadership Council of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which, for most of the past 20 years, effectively replaced AEI as the most prominent pro-Israel Washington think tank promoting war with Iran. Woolsey was also a co-founder of United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group closely tied to Israeli intelligence that has promoted comprehensive economic sanctions against Tehran since its founding in 2008.

Although Woolsey was not a signatory of PNAC’s 1997 charter, which was signed by a number of top Bush Jr. policymakers, including Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he did sign on to nine of the group’s open letters, including an April 2002 statement that called for the administration “to accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power” and asserted that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.”

Woolsey also served as a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, a civilian advisory body during the Bush administration initially chaired and organized by Perle. Just days after 9/11, Perle convened the Board and invited Ahmed Chalabi, head of the previously CIA-backed opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC) and a long-time Perle collaborator, to participate in its deliberations about Iraq as a possible target for U.S. military action and regime change. As a result of that meeting, Wolfowitz dispatched Woolsey — who, like Perle, had already declared on network television news that Hussein was likely to have been behind the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon — to gather evidence about Saddam’s alleged (but non-existent) ties to al-Qaeda and a previous 1993 bombing in the parking garage of the World Trade Center.

His mission — about which neither the State Department nor the CIA (which had several years before severed ties with Chalabi due to their assessment that he was completely unreliable) were informed — ended without acquiring the desired intelligence. Still, Woolsey, backed by the administration and the neoconservative network and echo chamber of which he had become an important part, continued to claim that Saddam and al-Qaeda worked together.

Chalabi’s INC nonetheless became the key source of disinformation about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that was seized upon and promoted to the mass media by the Pentagon, the White House, and the neoconservative echo chamber, including Woolsey himself.

Jim Lobe is a Contributing Editor of Responsible Statecraft. He formerly served as chief of the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service from 1980 to 1985 and again from 1989 to 2015.

July 23, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Iraq, United States